Inside the $1.78 billion deal no one saw coming
How the Aditya Birla Group, David Blitzer’s Bolt Ventures, the Times of India Group, and Blackstone’s BXPE Fund swooped in to clinch Royal Challengers Bengaluru
On Monday, March 16, just before five in the evening, the noise stopped.
For weeks, the Citigroup floor in Mumbai had hummed at an unnatural pitch. Bankers plugged into their earbuds, screens split between valuations and WhatsApp threads, calls bouncing between New York, London, Mumbai, and Singapore at hours that made time zones irrelevant.
Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB), the defending Indian Premier League (IPL) champions, one of the league’s most commercially magnetic franchises, and the only asset that had managed to hijack India’s sports-business conversation for half a year, was finally going to price.
At 4:59 pm, there were still messages to send and last-minute calls to make. At 5:00 pm, the line went flat.
When the deadline passed, there were two bids. Not nine. Two.
That was not the story the market had been telling itself.
The public version was cleaner. Diageo’s strategic review language read like a preface to a foregone conclusion. Bloomberg’s June 2025 report whispered that Diageo was seeking $2 billion for RCB.
By the morning of March 17, that script had split apart.
What followed over the next seven days would decide who actually owned one of India’s most valuable sports assets: panic calls in the dark, sharp pivots by bidders who thought they were done, and the late bids sliding in after the deadline.
This account draws on conversations with more than a dozen people familiar with the sale processes for Royal Challengers Bengaluru and Rajasthan Royals. All of them spoke on condition of strict anonymity because of the sensitive nature of those discussions.
